Tani E. Barlow – författare

This volume brings to the study of China the theoretical concerns and methods of contemporary critical cultural studies. Written by historians, art historians, anthropologists and literary critics who came of age after the People's Republic resumed scholarly ties with the United States, these essays provide new insights not only for China studies but also, by extension, for non-Asian cultural criticism. Contributors investigate problems of bodiliness, engendered subjectivities and discourses of power through a variety of sources that include written texts, paintings, buildings, interviews and observations. Taken together, the essays show that bodies in China have been classified, represented, discussed, ritualized, gendered and eroticized in as many ways as those described in critical histories of the West. Silk robes, rocks, winds, gestures of bowing, yin yang hierarchies and cross-dressing have helped create experiences of the body specific to Chinese historical life.By pointing to multiple examples of re-imagining subjectivity and renegotiating power, the essays encourage scholars to avoid making broad generalizations about China and to rethink traditional notions of power, subject and bodiliness in light of actual Chinese practices.

Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China''s most influential theoreticians and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist, her literary, film and TV commentary has, over the last decade, addressed an expanding audience in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.Cinema and Desire presents Dai Jinhau''s best work to date. In it she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, establishes Huang Shuqin''s Human, Woman, Demon as the People''s Republic''s first genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyses the rise of shopping plazas in 1990s'' urban China as a strange montage in which the political memories of Tiananmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist marketplace are intertwined.